Christmas Whiplash

This last weekend I was experiencing a little bit of Christmas whiplash. At one moment I would be very present with my hubby and my kids and then next moment transported back to very fond memories of Christmases circa the late 1960's.

A wave of nostalgia swept over me this last weekend. We had put the finishing touches on the Christmas tree and the boxes that had held decorations were back stowed away. Christmas music was playing from the boombox in the corner of the room and there was noise, maybe even laughter, coming from another room in the house. I looked over to the living room and my youngest son and daughter were sitting there looking through a toy catalog that had arrived in the mail.

All of a sudden I had images of sitting on the floor near the fireplace in our living room of my childhood home with my younger brothers flipping through the Sear Christmas catalog. Every year a giant catalog that must have been at least one inch thick would arrive in the mail. It was glorious. Not only did it have a picture of every toy that was available that season but it was also loaded with pictures from all their other departments. This was way before the Internet and so to have a book with all the new toys in full technicolor was so much fun. We would circle toys that would go on our Wish Lists and hope that somehow Santa would get the message.

So here it was a few decades later and my kids were looking through the catalog with the same intense looks on their faces. The only think was that this catalog was much smaller than the catalogs of yore and it was a little more modern. They were scouring through the ThinkGeek catalog. Instead of looking at dolls and toy trucks the catalog they were looking through was filled with Robots and T-shirts that featured Internet memes.

Watching my geeky kids sitting there scouring through the catalog made me feel a little bit like Jane Jetson looking at Judy and Elroy. And I was right back to Saturday morning 1968.....